TITLE: Rethinking Accounting Software and Interfaces in the 1980s
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 20, 2015 2:59 PM
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In
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface,
Bret Victor reminds us that the dominant style of user interface
today was created long before today's computers:
First, our current UI paradigm was invented in a different
technological era. The initial Macintosh, for example, had no
network, no mass storage, and little inter-program communication.
Thus, it knew little of its environment beyond the date and time,
and memory was too precious to record significant history.
Interaction was all it had, so that's what its designers used.
And because the computer didn't have much to inform anyone of,
most of the software at the time was manipulation software --
magic versions of the typewriter, easel, and ledger-book. Twenty
years and an internet explosion later, software has much more to
say, but an inadequate language with which to say it.
Victor's mention of the accounting ledger brings to mind the
work being done since the early 1980s by
Bill McCarthy,
an accounting professor at Michigan State. McCarthy is
motivated by a similar set of circumstances. The techniques
by which we do financial accounting were created long before
computers came along, and the constraints that made them
necessary no longer exist. But he is looking deeper than
simply the interaction style of accounting software; he is
interested in upending the underlying model of accounting
data.
McCarthy proposed the
resources, events, agents (REA) model
-- essentially an application of database theory from CS --
as an alternative to traditional accounting systems. REA
takes advantage of databases and other computing ideas to
create a more accurate model of a business and its activity.
It eliminates many of the artifacts of double-entry bookkeeping,
including debits, credits, and placeholder accounts such as
accounts receivable and payable, because they can generated in
real time from more fine-grained source data. An REA model of
a business enables a much wider range of decision support than
the traditional accounting model while still allowing the firm
to produce all the artifacts of traditional accounting as side
effect.
(I had the good fortune to work with McCarthy during my
graduate studies and even helped author a conference paper on
the development of expert systems from REA models. He also
served on my dissertation committee.)
In the early years, many academic accountants reacted with
skepticism to the idea of REA. They feared losing the
integrity of the traditional accounting model, which carried
a concomitant risk to the trust placed by the public in
audited financial statements. Most of these concerns were
operational, not theoretical. However, a few people viewed REA
as somehow dissing the system that had served the profession so
well for so long.
Victor includes a footnote in Magic Ink that
anticipates a similar concern from interaction designers to
his proposals:
Make no mistake, I revere GUI pioneers such as Alan Kay and
Bill Atkinson, but they were inventing rules for a different
game. Today, their windows and menus are like buggy whips
on a car. (Although Alan Kay clearly foresaw today's
technological environment, even in the mid-'70s. See
"A Simple Vision of the Future" in his fascinating
Early History of Smalltalk
(1993).)
"They were inventing rules for a different game." This
sentence echoes how I have always felt about
Luca Pacioli,
the inventor of
double-entry bookkeeping.
It was a remarkable technology that helped to enable the growth
of modern commerce by creating a transparent system of accounting
that could be trusted by insiders and outsiders alike. But he
was inventing rules for a different game -- 500 years ago. Half
a century dwarfs the forty or fifty year life of windows, icons,
menus, and pointing and clicking.
I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had pursued
McCarthy's line of work
more deeply. It dovetails quite nicely with software patterns
and would have been well-positioned for the more recent
re-thinking of financial support software in the era of
ubiquitous mobile computing. So many interesting paths...
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